Release 6.0 of Berkeley Logo is now available by anonymous FTP or Web. Versions are available for Unix, Windows, and MacOS X. (The DOS and MacOS Classic versions are frozen at 5.3, still online.) Berkeley Logo (a/k/a UCBLogo) is FREE SOFTWARE, with source code included. ------------- This major release includes a shift to using the wxWidgets cross-platform GUI toolkit, for a more uniform user experience across platforms. Logo is the educational programming language best known for its "turtle graphics" but also featuring easy and powerful facilities for computing with words and sentences. Sample projects included with the Berkeley Logo distribution range from a tic-tac-toe game to a Pascal compiler and a Logo implementation of Student, Daniel Bobrow's program that solves algebra word problems. Berkeley Logo is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License: You may redistribute it freely, and you may use it as a base for developing additional free software, but you may not use it as a base for commercial software products. The exact details are included in the distribution, in the file named GPL. Advantages of Berkeley Logo: * It's free. * It comes with source files (in C). * Logo programs are completely compatible among Unix, PC, and Mac. Disadvantages of Berkeley Logo: * It's relatively slow. * It doesn't do anything fancy about graphics. (One turtle.) This announcement has five more parts: * How to get Berkeley Logo. * Installation instructions. * Details about this release. * Pointers to other people's Berkeley-Logo-related distributions. * Instructions for DOS and MacOS Classic. ---------------------------------------- HOW TO GET BERKELEY LOGO: ---------------------------------------- To use a web browser, go to http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html Or, FTP to ftp.cs.berkeley.edu and get any of the following files: pub/ucblogo/ucblogo.tar.gz Unix sources and documentation (gzip format) pub/ucblogo/ucbwlogosetup.exe Windows version, self-installing, with executable UCBWLOGO.EXE pub/ucblogo/UCBLogo.dmg.sitx Mac OS X version, Intel/PowerPC, StuffIt-compressed disk image pub/ucblogo/ucblogo-4.xo OLPC XO activity pub/ucblogo/usermanual Just the documentation file (The filenames above are links to filenames that include the version number, e.g., ucblogo-6.0.tar.gz; either name is okay. Anything other than these versions, if still online, is in the subdirectory pub/ucblogo/old.) ----------- The Windows and Mac versions include a SOURCE subdirectory containing the C source files used to compile Berkeley Logo. If you don't want to play with the code, you can delete this directory and all its contents. You can also delete some or all of the contents of the DOCS directory, which has the usermanual in various formats (Postscript, PDF, HTML, INFO, TEXI). The HTML files are particularly huge, if you're looking for something to delete. (In the Unix version, the source files are in the top-level directory of the distribution.) In the source directory, the file plm is a Program Logic Manual that documents some of the inner mysteries of this interpreter. You should read _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_ before you read plm. Also included is evaluator.ps, a beautiful one-page simplified flowchart of the evaluator to admire while reading plm. In the Unix version, if you want to save space, you can delete the entire ucblogo directory created by tar once you've done "make install". ---------------------------------------- INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS: ---------------------------------------- The Unix version is a compressed tar file. To install it, copy to your machine, then say gunzip ucblogo.tar tar -xf ucblogo.tar cd ucblogo-6.0 ./configure make The makefile compiles with optimization turned off. This is necessary to avoid mysterious garbage collection failures. (NOTE: On my HP 712, for reasons I don't understand, I had to compile the entire interpreter without optimization. But on other platforms, such as PCs running Linux and FreeBSD, it's sufficient merely to un-optimize mem.c. If that works on your machine, you can remove the "-O0" at the end of the CFLAGS line at the beginning of the makefile, after running configure.) --------- The Windows version is in the form of an installer, with the usual options for desktop icons and the like. The Logo interpreter, named LOGO.EXE, requires Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP or later (not 3.1; sorry). It is distributed as a self-installing setup file. --------- The MacOS X version is an application that can just be dragged into your Applications folder. ---------------------------------------- THIS RELEASE: ---------------------------------------- All platforms: MAJOR CHANGE: All platforms now use a uniform graphical user interface, based on the wxWidgets library. A very simple editor is part of the package, no more external editor. This GUI is, so far, rather primitive, but provides a framework that should allow for many improvements relatively soon. There is a single Logo window that can be in fullscreen, splitscreen, or textscreen mode, like traditional Logo versions. INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: RGB color lists, as used by PALETTE, SETPALETTE, etc., now take integer or non-integer values between 0 and 100 rather than integers between 0 and 65535. I don't like incompatible changes, but having now actually tried teaching kids with Berkeley Logo, I've learned that they have trouble understanding the old system; their colors all come out near-black. New commands PRINTPICT and PRINTTEXT to print the graphics and text screens, respectively. If called with an argument (in parentheses), they print preview instead. (wxWidgets only) New commands INCREASEFONT and DECREASEFONT to make the text window font one size bigger or smaller, SETTEXTSIZE to set the absolute size, SETLABELHEIGHT to adjust graphics-window text size, and SETFONT to set the font name for all windows. (wxWidgets only) SETTEXTCOLOR (SETTC) command, formerly just in DOS version, works on all platforms. It takes two color number or RGB lists as inputs, first the text color, then the text background color. (wxWidgets only) New command FILLED takes two arguments, a color and an instruction list. The instructions should draw a simple closed curve (but if not closed, FILLED will add a turtle move back to the starting point). The instructions are carried out, and then the area enclosed by the curve is filled using the given color, regardless of other lines that might intersect that area. (wxWidgets only) Special variable BUTTONACT, if defined and nonempty, is an instruction list to be run when the user presses a mouse button. Special variable KEYACT, if ditto, is to be run when the user presses a key on the keyboard. It is the responsibility of the user code to handle the problem of a second mouse/keypress during the running of these instructions. New operation CLICKPOS outputs the position of the mouse at the moment when the mouse button was pressed. BUTTON outputs which button was most recently pressed, or zero if no button was pressed since the last call to BUTTON. (BUTTONP still reflects the actual current button status.) (wxWidgets only) The workspace management procedures (PO, TEXT, HELP, etc.) look in the library before deciding whether the name you give exists as a procedure or not, just the way running the procedure does. This is an incompatible change! The procedure formerly named BACKSLASHEDP or BACKSLASHED? is now called VBARREDP or VBARRED?, to reflect a longstanding change in its meaning. The old names are retained in the Logo library for backward compatibility. A command line argument consisting of just a hyphen means that all following command line arguments should be collected in a list, instead of taken as filenames to load. The list can be seen in the buried variable :COMMAND.LINE Logo looks in its library directory (e.g., /usr/local/lib/logo/logolib) for a file startup.lg, and runs it if found, before looking in the user's current directory for startup.lg and running that. A vertical bar that comes after a semicolon doesn't require a matching vertical bar to end the line. Fixed a garbage collector bug (although I don't know why it was a bug, alas). The buffer for saving pictures (for SAVEPICT and EPSPICT and for restoring the graphics window after it's hidden) has no size limit. INVOKE is a macro, so (INVOKE [IF ? < 0 [OUTPUT "NEGATIVE]] :X) will output from the caller, rather than from INVOKE. Improved error message "Runlist %s has more than one expression" for the case of a macro seen where an expression (that outputs a value) is needed: PRINT RUN [PRINT "A PRINT "B]. One-pixel moves from drawing turtle aren't saved in SAVEPICT buffer. (1 2 3) gives error message instead of blowing up. PRINT [~] (bracket after tilde) works (no line continuation). The check for END inside a multi-line instruction is correctly internationalized. APPLY [[][]] [] no longer crashes. APPLY copies the arg list, so the original list can't be modified by changes to the inputs (e.g., after an error). Better error message (don't know how) for too much inside parens and also the first one isn't a procedure name. Better error message for STOP or OUTPUT during a PAUSE. Fixed bug crashing backquote (`) in case of `[[,[...] ...]] Fixed bug giving "out of bounds" message for line just on screen edge. Fixed bug that ignored TEST outside of a procedure. Turtle is invisible during drawing (to speed it up). Windows: Mac: Unix: ---------------------------------------- OTHER UCBLOGO-RELATED DISTRIBUTIONS: ---------------------------------------- MSWLogo is a free port of Berkeley Logo to Microsoft Windows done by George Mills. He has added a lot of Windows-specific capability to the language, so you can do cool multimedia stuff with it. Look in http://www.softronix.com/logo.html David Costanzo's FMSLogo, an updated version of MSWLogo, is at http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/ Andreas Micheler's aUCBLogo, a rewrite and enhancement of UCBLogo, is at http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/~micheler/ --- Adaptation francaise pour MSWLogo et UCBLogo: A startup file and documentation for UCBLogo in French is at http://www.algo.be/logo1/MSWlogo-fr.html Thanks to Francis Leboutte. ---------------------------------------- VERSION 5.3 FOR OLDER PLATFORMS: ---------------------------------------- To use a web browser, go to http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html Or, FTP to ftp.cs.berkeley.edu and get any of the following files: pub/ucblogo/blogo.exe DOS version, PKZIP format, including executables BL.EXE and UCBLOGO.EXE pub/ucblogo/ucblogo.sea Mac Classic version, StuffIt format, w/executable Logo pub/ucblogo/ucblogo.sea.hqx Mac Classic version, BinHexed StuffIt format, including executable Logo Be sure to use BINARY transfer mode when retrieving the archive files! ----------- The DOS 5.3 version is in the form of a self-extracting PKZIP archive. Run BLOGO.EXE ; it will create two files, INSTALL.BAT and INSTALLU.EXE. Then run INSTALL to create a C:\UCBLOGO directory with the complete distribution. If you want to install Logo somewhere other than C:\UCBLOGO, you can say installu -d d:\foo\ to put it in d:\foo\ucblogo. DON'T FORGET THE "-d" PART! The DOS distribution includes two executable programs. BL.EXE runs on any DOS PC, but is limited to 640K of memory. UCBLOGO.EXE requires a 286-or-better processor, but is able to take advantage of extended memory if you have it. Read the README file for technical details. The BL.EXE version, for really old 8086 PCs, is frozen at version 3.6, because the garbage collection algorithm introduced in version 4.0 doesn't work well with really small memory. ----------- The Mac Classic 5.3 version is in the form of a BinHex-converted self-extracting StuffIt archive. To install it, just copy to your hard disk, un-BinHex it (this may be done automatically by your file transfer program), and double-click on it.